Cold
by BookOfXcentric
Summary: A very short story about Natsume alone one night in an orphanage common room a few months before he meet the Fujiwaras. My friend and I wrote this quite some time ago…


**A/N: **This didn't turn out like we wanted it to, it kinda went a little overboard but, whatever… we could have made it a lot better but it is just a product of a thought which hit us one night (after one glass of wine too much).  
My friend's lived as a foster child and in an orphanage, so we based it on her experiences and feelings…  
Personally I usually write dark stuff or humour but Natsume yuujinchou is neither so it isn't really my cup of tea, even tough I love the manga!

**Quote if the fic:  
**_Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings. Always darker, emptier and simpler.  
_- Friedrich Nietzsche

Cold.

Not in the physical sense of the word but rather the abstract one. An untouchable deep freeze.

The light yellow walls with their bright colourful butterflies painted on, the colours so contrary to each other that it produced an ill effect to the eye. Shocking the organ every time you made the mistake of focusing at them.

Large windows with hardened glass, so that it wouldn't break as easily. Adorned by stickers of stars, rainbows, puppies and other things people generally considered pretty and enjoyable to the younger population.

Cheap toys; which had accumulated in numbers over the years and years this place had existed. He vaguely wondered how many dirty unwashed hands had played with the sad plastic objects.

Vinyl floors. Cheap, and easily cleaned. A convenience more then a design treat.

At first glance it resembled a day-care centre. A 24/7 365 day-care centre. Sometimes he just wanted to grab one of the 50 odd plastic chairs in the room and throw it out the window, maybe just to break the glass, tear the stickers that fooled no one on the inside.

But the glass wouldn't even crack. Others had already tried and failed. Why add his name to that never ending list.

He resented it. But he also accepted it. For it had proved somewhat better then the alternative.  
Dumped, shunned, hated he always came back here. It carried a sort of dry, torrid humour to it. Returned like an unwanted package. Laughable as it really were; he almost referred to it as home by now. Though it was only supposed to be a halfway house.

He wanted to be one of those carefree people passing by outside, fooled by the pretty stickers into believing that the people on the inside were happy.

It wouldn't be long now, soon he would be on of those people, but he would never be fooled by stickers.

Soon he would be left alone. He always had been, but soon he would be so in every sense of the word. He wanted the people who didn't understand and their hurtful words to leave him alone, wanted the ayakashi to go away and leave him be. His heart clenched painfully at the thought of the spirits who followed him everywhere he came and he wished he could have been normal. If he didn't see the things he saw, didn't hear the things he heard then maybe he could have had someone, somewhere to go. A family. Now he had nothing to look forward to more then the prospect of not having to be shunned by another family again. But; there's a huge difference between being alone and being lonely.

All the families he'd been with only made him crave the loneliness more, made him resent humanity as much as the grudge he bore against those spirits who sometimes seemed to enjoy making his life just a little bit harder.

Maybe kind people didn't exist, they did seem to be a rarity. Maybe he would encounter some one day. In case of such an eventuality he was prepared to make sure never to bother them with his abilities.

The ayakashi, a frequent occurrence as they were, was also the only constant factor of his life… 'It's good to have a vivid imagination but don't lose touch with reality' he had been told by one of the social workers when he was younger. But her reality and his were two very different approaches, to him her costumed reality was frequently inaccurate.

THE END

**A/N:** I know Natsume lived with distant relatives most of the time but in my imagination he lived at an orphanage in between, and I kinda have this idea that he was a bit more resentful before he meet the Fujiwara's. That they have pretty much warmed him up, and he's considerate so that no one will bother trying to figure out what's really going on… He's actually playing a theatre.  
Natsume is a complicated character.  
(My friend who's lived a similar life stayed at an orphanage while the social service tried to locate relatives (Though they referred to it a halfway house, because orphanage sounds so crappy))


End file.
